It’s fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn’t make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, “Oh yeah, this stuff is good.”
Month: February 2007
What is the relationship between intelligence and wisdom?
“Wise” and “smart” are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that “wise” means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and “smart” means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks.
Innovation and Geography
Does geographical locations play an important role upon innovation? Certainly, and the New York Times recently published an article outlining why phenomena like the iPod, Google or eBay could only happen in Silicon Valley.
The Invention of the Telephone
Most people attribute the telephone’s invention to Alexander Graham Bell, but in reality both him and Elisha Gray developed a similar device early in the 1870s. Bell managed to arrive to the patent office a couple of hours before Gray, and afterwards he also won the legal battle to determine who could claim the invention.
Innovation, back to the basics
There is a very interesting article over BusinessWeek outlining the hype that the innovation term has gained lately. Most of the companies around the world are declaring that innovation is a building block of their strategy, but few of those companies actually grasp the true dynamics of innovation.
Innovation Quotes: Know thy Customer
“We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we’re in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There’s no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.”
Are Blogs the New Resumes?
Blogs are certainly redefining the online landscape. There are 55 million of them and counting, with some studies confirming that more than 100,000 blogs are created everyday! Blogs are invading corporate websites, online newspapers and content portals. Could blogs also replace resumes, though?
Innovation through Collaboration
Mass collaboration and open innovation models are widely employed on “new economy” segments. Just think about Linux and the open source phenomenon or companies like Amazon.com and IBM that created products with the inputs of large third-party developer communities.
Competitive Advantage: Economies of Scale
Economies of scale represent the classic source of cost advantage. It basically refers to a situation where a firm can decrease the average cost per unit by increasing the total output. Economies of scale is also equivalent to an increase returns to scale situation, meaning that if we increase the inputs by X% the outputs will consequently increase by more than X%.
How to be a Disruptor
There is an interesting article over the Fobes magazine titled “How to be a Disruptor”. In the article Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, argues that for every successful disruptor dozens have tried and failed.